Support My Writing

Saturday, September 1, 2012

“I’m not wearing any underpants”: Stories my mother told me

Talk about an attention-getting title for a blog
post! As I have mentioned in a few previous posts, I have been having a hard
time keeping up my blog recently. Stress, pressures, lack of energy, and some
other issues have turned my creativity upside down. I am doing my best to get
back into the groove, and the stubborn part of me doesn’t want to completely
cave into it!

This evening, as I was taking a hot shower, a
very funny story came into my mind. I thought it would be terrible for a great
story like this to go untold. After all, the best articles, books, novels, and
poems all have one thing in common- a terrific story.

My mother is German. She was born in Germany in
the late 1930s, and her early childhood memories involve war. She has hundreds
of amazing stories from that time, and I hope at some point to be able to
capture them. This story I am about to tell, however, tells a story of when she
first moved to the United States in the late 1950s. It is a family classic.

Here is the background- Washington, D.C., in
1958, my mother has recently arrived from her hometown of Köln, Germany, and
has been staying with one of her great aunts- a wealthy woman who has been
living in the U.S. for a few decades. My mother had THREE such great aunts, who
were all her paternal grandmother’s sisters. They are always referred to by my
mother by the streets they lived on in D.C.There was Aunt Mintwood Place, Aunt Holly Street, and Aunt Columbia Road.
Aunt Mintwood Place was the wealthiest, snobbiest, and meanest. She treated my
mother very shabbily, and after my mother married my Cuban father, was never
heard from again.But I digress.

This particular story takes place in D.C. at the
Shrine of the Sacred Heart on corner of 16th and Park Road.
My mother and Aunt Mintwood Place were going to Mass one Sunday morning. Aunt
Mintwood Place always dressed to the nines to go to Mass, and she had on a very
beautiful dress, her mink coat, and her veil. In those days, Catholic women had
to wear some sort of head covering when they entered a church. Unfortunately
for my poor mother, that was NOT the custom in Köln, and she had not
remembered to bring her head covering.

Jackie Kennedy wearing a head covering to Mass

As the story goes, once inside the church, Aunt Mintwood Place kept
touching the top of her head and looking at my mother with dagger eyes. My
mother couldn’t figure it out, and afterward, her aunt gave her a serious
lecture about how she was now in the U.S. and that she needed to ALWAYS have her head covering for Mass in the
future. So, my poor immigrant mother took her lecture like a woman and started
walking out the door of the church.

There is a long, stone, stairway down to the
street and my mother had walked quickly ahead of Aunt Mintwood Place when she
called after her. “Oh, the wind is blowing very hard! I am afraid my dress is
going to blow upward in the wind. “

My mother looked at her with a perplexed face, but then saw
that the pleated skirt she had on was indeed blowing upward. So, my mother
leaned in toward her and said, “What are you so worried about?” to which Aunt
Mintwood Place, who had been so very worried about my mother’s bare head in
church, uttered the now infamous sentence- “I’m not wearing any underpants.”PRICELESS.

My mother stands there looking at her, completely
overwhelmed by the irony of the situation. She told us, years later, that all she could think
about was the old biddy standing in front of her, decked out in her diamonds,
mink, expensive dress, head covering and NO PANTIES! How incredibly
hypocritical of her! The obvious “moral” of this story- Get your priorities
straight. Cover your ass before worrying about covering your head.

I hope you enjoyed this story as much as we have
enjoyed it these 50 plus years. It reads like a joke, but it’s 100% true. MORE stories to come.

About Me

Diana's Blogtalk Radio Interview with Diane V

Thanks for your support!

With my Angus

Sole Society

Give your friends 20% off.
You get $25 when they buy!
Refer your friends—they will get 20% off their first purchase of $60 or more.
Use this link- http://www.solesociety.com/invite/link/index/id/11623313/type/2/
Once they have made a purchase using your exclusive referral link you’ll get a code for $25 off your next SOLE SOCIETY purchase!